You've been creating digital customer experiences for years now. You've built a successful app. You’ve assembled a martech/adtech stack. You may even have started swinging at omnichannel delivery or harnessed AI or piloted a connected product. So it’s time to declare victory on digital transformation, right?

Every fall Forrester’s Security & Risk team comes together to make a set of predictions on the issues that will have the greatest impact on our clients in the next year. We don’t make broad, Nostradamus-like predictions like “There will be a breach at a large company in a great city.” Instead, we go out of our way to make detailed predictions that force us to take strong stances, can easily prove wrong or right and are actionable by security and risk professionals. Before we provide a sneak peek into our 2017 predictions, it’s worth looking back and grading our 2016 predictions. 2016 was a particularly tumultuous year for cybersecurity. News agencies kept themselves busy as companies and public figures struggled with breaches, companies experienced embarrassing downtime and individuals felt their privacy rights slip away. The result? Cybersecurity has now vaulted from the boardroom to the Senate floor and to the Presidential debate stage. So how'd we do?

You've been creating digital customer experiences for years now. You've built a successful app. You’ve assembled a martech/adtech stack. You may even have started swinging at omnichannel delivery or harnessed AI or piloted a connected product. So it’s time to declare victory on digital transformation, right? [In our 2016 services survey, a shockingly high 19% have . . .]

Not so fast. Digital customer experiences are only the shining faces of a digital business. Those pretty faces quickly lose their luster unless you’ve also transformed your business operations to make them better every single day -- and introduce new digital faces all the time. We call this capability "digital operational excellence." It’s the 80 in the 80/20 rule of digital transformation. Here are three predictions for 2017 to prod the digital business conversation:

To help security and risk professionals navigate the complex landscape of privacy laws around the world, Forrester created a data privacy heat map that highlights the data protection guidelines and practices for 54 different countries. Earlier today, we published the 2016 version to the tool, as well as a free version with access to only the U.K. and U.S. ratings. We have updated the map every year since it’s initial publication in order to keep pace with the constantly-evolving landscape of global data privacy laws.

As we roll out the 2016 update and reflect back on the past 5 years of annual assessments, three high-level trends emerge:

Countries continue moving toward the EU standard for data protection. New legislation outside of the EU often follows the EU’s lead by adopting provisions similar to those in the existing Directive 95/46/EC regulation. The slow global convergence toward the requirements outlined in the regulation continued through 2016. For example, Argentina and Japan strengthened pre-existing policies, while Nigeria passed its first comprehensive cybercrime legislation. Japan also established an independent regulatory body (“Privacy Protection Commission”) that oversees privacy issues—a requirement of both the current Directive and the superseding European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Get used to it. Gone are the days of stability and predictability. The business environment you operate in will change faster than ever in 2017. Many of these changes will be outside of your control, but your ability to anticipate and respond will make or break your success. At the heart of this change is the ever-more empowered customer that will accelerate a domino effect of changes in the business environment in which you operate. So here is a quick summary of some of the actions we expect CIOs to take in 2017.

■ Empowered customers drive strategy. Customer obsession is paramount for business success in this rapidly changing world. Ever growing numbers of devices and information lead to a desire for new products and services at a rapid pace. CIOs need to extend their focus beyond building great customer experiences. Striving for speed and flexibility in re-designing core operational function and leveraging emerging technology are both necessary to meet these accelerating customer needs.

■ CIOs will correct bi-modal missteps. Over the past few years, many CIOs fell for the false promise of a bi-modal strategy. But those CIOs are already experiencing the shortcomings of operating a two speeds. Business peer frustration, polarizing and deteriorating cultures, and unsustainable operational complexities will continue, ultimately spurring most of these CIOs to course correct in 2017.

Video conveys emotion unlike text and can show features and functionality unlike any picture. That’s why retailers see nearly triple the conversion rate on product pages that have video versus those that don’t. Entering what Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls “this new golden age of videos online,” companies and brands need an enterprise-class online video platform to deliver the video experiences that drive customer engagement.

Bouncing among cognitive sessions and weaving though the crowds, it’s not clear what hurts the most, my feet or my brain. How much of this are we to believe? What is actually deployable, affordable, and usable by mere humans, and when? The cognitive exuberance at World of Watson (WOW) was certainly exhausting and even by tech conference standards, overplayed. IBM, it’s partners, and tech analysts were much better at painting the future vision then how to break that vision into an actionable sequence of steps to be followed.

And that’s one reason, IBM’s announcement of a new collaboration product, IBM Watson Workspace, got my attention. In short, it seems a practical solution to a really bad problem, our Digital Disorder. Not to sound Trump-esk, but our daily digital lives are quickly becoming a disaster. Workspace is a group messaging tool that uses Watson to help and is now available as a “pre-view “version, basically for folks to play with. While release plans are not totally baked, rumblings are that IBM will release it on a Fremium basis- taking a page from fast moving startups.

Does Workspace have a chance? It does and here’s why. Expertise routing, recommendations, and personal assistance are the new battleground for collaboration. Let’s call it people analytics. It is the last and most important mile of a less then sterling collaboration journey. Or to put it another way, cognitive may be the last hope to relieve the Digital Disorder we have created. .

Videoconferencing technology has the awesome power to connect teams separated by oceans or internal silos, but it’s still not frictionless. Technical difficulties that delay videoconferences account for millions of dollars a year in lost productivity. In our brief Start Your Videoconferences On Time, we take a look at some best practices to avoid productivity loss. Inside the report is an interactive calculator so that you can customize the scenario to your business and build the case for change.

From 2013 to 2015, the prevalence of web- and videoconferencing use by global information workers grew 40%, according to Forrester Business Technographics data. But companies have multiple VC vendors or don’t deploy it universally and that contributes to technical difficulties.

Technology has become the foundation for nearly every customer experience, enabling companies to provide new sources of value to customers with each interaction. It’s no surprise, then, that business leaders are shifting their mindset and their approach to technology.

Specifically, tech-empowered customers and their rising expectations have led to changes in:

Business priorities and areas for improvement.

Who is involved in the decision-making process for tech purchases.

Overall budgets for technology investments.

The infographic below dives deeper into these new purchasing trends:

As business leaders begin to play a larger role in tech investments, it’s important to know the kinds of decisions they’re making and what they expect from you along the way. A deep understanding of your changing tech buyers will help you succeed in an era where technology underpins everything we do.

On October 22, 2016, AT&T announced its intention to acquire Time Warner for an equity value of $85.4 billion. The deal is essentially about the combination of quality content and content distribution, as it transforms AT&T into a content producer and owner — rather than just a distributor of content. Many telecom regulators restrict revenue growth opportunities for telcos in highly regulated telco markets. As a result, telcos are increasingly looking outside their markets for growth opportunities. This deal is evidence of this trend.

Telco CIOs Must Become More Strategic To Prepare For The Content Opportunity

The AT&T-Time Warner deal deserves special attention by telco CIOs. The deal needs to be seen against a challenging backdrop for the telco industry, where revenue growth from traditional revenue sources is hard to come by. Yes, AT&T already operates the largest US pay-TV business through its ownership of DirecTV. The Time Warner deal — should it materialize — would enable AT&T to offer its own premium entertainment programming to its pay-TV, mobile phone, and internet customers. AT&T’s intention to acquire Time Warner opens a new chapter for telcos, because the combination of quality content and content distribution potentially helps telcos to: